Honey, We Need To Talk About Venture Capital

It's not you... It's systemic capture.

Given the interest in my venture capital hot take in my last post, combined with the fact that this is forming quite a lot of my economic research at the moment on Chinese industrialization, here’s a whole brain dump on venture capital, and the full reason as to why I think it’s an organized racket!

TL:DR; Venture capital has evolved from funding innovation to engineering exits by constructing outcomes in partnership with the state. The result is a venture–industrial complex where private capital and public power have effectively merged, bringing the Western model of economic development incredibly close to the East’s!

Marc Andreessen

When people think of venture capital (VC), what usually comes to mind? Here are some buzzwords to elicit excitement in the subject I’m about to dive into:

• High-risk, high-reward

• Moonshots

• Unicorns

• Disruption

• “Move fast and break things”

• Zero to one

• 10x returns

• Risk capital

• Smart money (lol)

• “Founders first”

• FOMO

A VC fund is essentially a vehicle which raises money (often tens or hundreds of millions of dollars) from Limited Partners (LPs) - huuuuge pension funds, governments, insurance funds, retirement funds, university endowment funds– to invest into high-risk, but high-reward startups.

The idea is that you can “spray and pray” your way to multiplying the LP’s money: invest that capital into lots of bets that will statistically go nowhere, apart from one or two which will make so much goddamn money that your entire fund will be returned many times over.

Or so it says on the tin. The reality couldn’t be more different.

I’m about to walk you through how VC, an asset class built on risk, became one that now spends billions ensuring it never has to take any. And how most VC funds, largely unaware of how their own industry actually works, function like slow-motion Ponzi schemes.

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So how you might think VC acts today is largely just a hangover of how VC genuinely started as an asset class.

In the beginning, venture was small, scrappy, and genuinely uncertain. The funds were lean (imagine the equivalent of a search fund today!) and the founders were really, really weird. Risk wasn’t a bug but the entire feature. Your job as a VC was to bet on the least corporate outliers precisely because the market didn’t yet know how to price them.

You went looking for the high-value weirdos hiding in a haystack of sensible businesses, and you doubled down when you found them.

Now, think back to the early days of Silicon Valley, from the 1980s through the dot-com boom (~2000), where the biggest fund sizes are around $150 million.

This certainly doesn’t seem like a lot of money now, but these funds could take a dozen wild swings and still move the needle with a single asymmetric win (Google, Genentech, Amazon) that could return the whole fund many times over. For many of these investors, it was like printing money!

So yes, the math worked because the markets were open, the information asymmetry was very real, and the exit paths were organic. IPOs happened all the time, and averaged the $160 million deal size. Venture capital, at its best, was capitalism’s laboratory: small, experimental, and occasionally hitting home runs.

Back then, scale was the reward for risk. You earned your reputation by being early, contrarian, and (importantly) right. Of course, LPs rewarded instinct on that intuition with upside. The defining aesthetic of the industry was discovery and the sense that somewhere, in a garage or a Stanford dorm, a small team was imagining the future just far enough to glimpse it first.

But success, as it tends to, changed the math. Early venture partnerships were structured for asymmetric outcomes: small checks into unproven markets where variance was the point. A $100 million fund could write a dozen $5–10 million checks, lose out on nine, and still be legendary if only one returned $3 billion. That’s what made the early model statistically elegant: the portfolio didn’t need certainty, it only needed a long tail. *Chef’s Kiss*

Then came the compounding. Once those early wins turned $100 million funds into $1 billion funds, the underlying arithmetic started to break down. A fund ten times larger can’t simply do ten times more early-stage deals: there aren’t enough viable founders, nor enough liquidity events to absorb that volume of capital!

This is exactly why, when someone tells me “They raised a $150m fund to invest into Irish space startups!”, my face will drop: because there are not enough Irish space startups to absorb this investment. And this is not a theoretical hangup that is based on niche combinations of investments such as “Irish” and “space”; I remember over a decade ago working with a prominent VC fund which was exploring a $300mm fund for Australasia. It turned out that back then, there was just nowhere to “park” your $300 million in Australia in the expectation that it might be worth more than ten times that amount within five years.

Thus, the bigger the growth of your fund, the more the distribution curve flattens. Returns concentrate. And the entire model shifts from optionality (I wonder if I should invest in that business?) to obligation (I have to invest in that business because I have to spend this money somehow!).

At that size, venture capital stops behaving like money that chases bold ideas and starts behaving like Big Venture: money that just wants predictable returns (also called yield-seeking capital).

Here are the main issues with these larger funds:

• Portfolio theory inversion: Large funds can’t afford variability in returns! Instead of high-volatility moonshots (maybe it will, maybe it won’t), they optimize for predictable multiples of returns

• Liquidity constraint: Late-stage rounds are required simply to deploy capital quickly enough to justify management fees. This is also called “investment fatigue”; you get so tired of deploying capital, which is hard, that you start investing larger amounts of it into shittier companies.

• Duration mismatch: LPs (pension funds, endowments) want steady returns that look like fixed income (bonds: nice and stable), not decade-long binary bets (this year it worked, last year it didn’t!).

• Signaling equilibrium: When every megafund piles into the same few “consensus winners,” valuations decouple from market fundamentals, which is just a fancy way of saying BUBBLE creation.

In other words: success that compounded in Big Venture funds actually became a liability! The bigger the fund, the fewer companies on earth could possibly grow fast enough, or big enough, to return that fund.

And with that, the logic of venture inverted.

The entirety of the megafund theses can be reduced to:

Huge scale led to Big Venture megafunds which were suddenly so large that they faced global macro exposure for these funds; in turn this exposure demanded much more certainty around their investments; so this certainty required the funds to control the macro landscape to protect their portfolio.

Thus, the riskiest asset class in the world ended up run by investors who could no longer tolerate risk.

Ironic? Yes.

Policy Capital, not Venture Capital

As for the entirety of the financial markets, the 2008 financial crisis was the hinge for venture capital. Unlike other investment classes though, the market didn’t collapse so much as change significantly.

After 2008, as I’ve outlined several times recently, the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates to near-zero in an attempt to resuscitate the global economy, and within a very short amount of time, suddenly the world was awash in capital looking for yield again! (The great revival worked, it seemed. Perhaps too well…)

Pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds: these are all the Limited Partners behind venture funds, and they suddenly needed somewhere to put their money. Fast. The result of course was a tidal wave of inflows into private markets, including venture capital, growth equity, private credit, infrastructure.

For VC as an asset class, this was both a blessing and a curse.

Cheap capital moved in faster than genuine innovation could absorb it. Now, the problem was no longer finding good startups, but how to find enough of them. The old playbook of “early bets” and “asymmetric wins” couldn’t scale to billions under management.

A new model had to emerge, one that replaced market discovery (funding innovation) with market construction (creating outcomes).

Enter the era of Venture Developmentalism, a topic of economic development that is absorbing most of my time right now.

So to maintain their high returns despite having fewer startups to invest in, megafunds began doing what large institutions always do when the market stops cooperating: they moved upstream into policy.

This is what I mean when I talk about Big Venture: the top layer of the industry that now manages tens of billions of dollars and operates more like a shadow industrial policy than an investment class.

Think Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Founders Fund, Tiger Global, Coatue, SoftBank’s Vision Fund, and Khosla Ventures; all firms so large they can’t rely on market discovery anymore. Their scale forces them to manufacture outcomes, build moats through regulation, and align their portfolios with national policy.

Earlier generations of Big Venture learned this playbook the long way (by accident). Companies like Uber and Airbnb were the original stress tests for how far venture firms could stretch the law before rewriting it. So what began as regulatory friction (Is this even legal?) became the template for how to turn noncompliance into gigantic IPOs. By the time those companies forced cities and states to retrofit policy around their business models, investors had discovered a new superpower: you don’t have to predict markets if you can literally just legislate them!

Because you know, when you can’t count on luck, you have to consolidate power and leverage.

That leverage came in four forms: Narrative, Network, Regulatory, Industrial.

1. Narrative Leverage

If risk can’t be reduced, it can be rebranded. And boy, did Big Venture discover the power of story as policy.

By shaping the public imagination (podcasts, essays, and in-house think tanks) they redefined venture as a moral project rather than just a financial one.

A16z’s Future podcast, Marc Andreessen’s viral essay “It’s Time to Build,” and Katherine Boyle’s American Dynamism thesis recast founders as civic heroes instead of profit-seekers. Founders Fund immersed its portfolio in libertarian myth (Palantir and Anduril as the “defenders of the West” after all!) Even Sequoia began talking about itself in terms of national resilience, splitting itself into regional champions to match the geopolitics of power. (Is this a good time to mention Shaun Maguire? No? Ok…)

2. Network Leverage

Next came coordination. When funds get too big to be “contrarian” alone, they syndicate power together.

The goal is to invest so much into a few chosen winners, that the winners become too big to fail. So the same handful of Big Venture partners (at Sequoia, A16z, Founders Fund, Tiger, Coatue, etc) now move in tandem across deals, ensuring valuations, exits, and narratives all align perfect to deploy vast amounts of capital before, amazingly, exiting to another company or to the stock market at precisely the right time, whilst knowing that if the exit never comes, the government bailout will.

Add in the corporate and defense networks that have emerged (Microsoft with OpenAI, Palantir with the Pentagon) and you have what amounts to a distributed industrial policy executed by private capital!

Thus, and extremely importantly, the original VC mandate of market discovery was replaced by its new mandate of market coordination.

3. Regulatory Leverage

By the late 2010s, Big Venture had begun building in-house policy machines. A16z led the way, launching one of the most active crypto lobbying operations in the US In 2021, it opened a full-time Washington office staffed with former Treasury and CFTC officials, transforming lobbying from a subcontracted service into an internal function of the firm!

The goal was simple: shape the legal terrain before it solidified. a16z’s crypto policy frameworks (like “How to Build a Better Internet”) and white papers started to be regurgitated within draft legislation. Partners met with senators to frame Web3 as a matter of national competitiveness, not speculative finance.

In practice, the lobbying ensures that the protocols and exchanges a16z backs are classified as “commodities” rather than “securities”, a distinction worth billions in regulatory treatment. (This is the difference between a16z Partners being “unbelievably good investors” and “undeniably going to jail”). When Gary Gensler’s SEC began tightening enforcement, a16z Crypto’s general counsel, Miles Jennings, published a multi-part series arguing that “innovation and compliance can coexist”, effectively drafting the alternative rulebook in public. For the record, Gensler is now gone, but Jennings is not.

This regulatory strategy worked. By embedding itself in the policymaking process, these funds blurred the line between regulator and regulated, turning legal ambiguity into their unbeatable source of alpha.

4. Industrial Alignment

Finally, the ultimate source of certainty for their portfolio growth: state demand.

When Big Venture realized that shitty consumer apps and products couldn’t absorb their massive amounts of capital, they moved into strategic industries: AI, defense, energy, semiconductors.

The logic is infallible. Given that markets are unpredictable, why not park the capital where the customer never goes bankrupt. The government! Or in other words: sell shovels to the miners.

Palantir did a pretty good job with perfecting this, by turning its long courtship of the US and UK government departments into perpetual procurement. Anduril, similarly built in Thiel’s image, embedded directly into Pentagon programs and border contracts, marketing itself as “defense tech that looks like software.” OpenAI wrapped itself around federal AI strategy, positioning safety alignment as policy partnership.

And beyond them: SpaceX and Tesla proved that nothing scales like the state. SpaceX built NASA’s rockets and launched the Pentagon’s satellites. Tesla turned decarbonization subsidies into its primary growth engine, while its balance sheet quietly floated on the back of US and EU climate policy.

What began as venture capital investing in innovation has essentially become venture capital contracting for sovereignty.

The Venture-State Symbiosis

By this point, the system had clearly become self-referential. Capital no longer needed to chase opportunities because it was already manufacturing the conditions for it. (This, ironically, is exactly the role of the government!).

Each turn of the cycle made the relationship between the venture megafund and the state tighter, less deniable, more necessary.

Huge megafunds start to depend on policy; policy likewise then starts to rely on megafunds; both policy and megafunds then rely on certainty; and having certainly means you can be a bigger megafund or a larger government!

This is the feedback loop of the the public-private spine that now underwrites the entire innovation economy. The VC funds need the government, and the government needs the VC funds.

Why? Well…

Governments need venture funds to perform innovation theatre: to recreate the optics of agility, and to give the illusion of progress through the “builder optimism” that bureaucracies can’t stage on their own.

Venture, meanwhile, needs governments to perform risk absorption: to guarantee the markets, to fund the infrastructure, to convert volatility into returns.

Each provides what the other lacks! Thus the venture–state symbiosis that emerges is a closed ecosystem of power. Consider the interchangeability of the following:

• Public money OR private runway?

• Regulation OR competitive moat?

• Procurement OR exit strategy?

• Narrative OR national policy?

The result is a new kind of developmental model that I call venture developmentalism, where the instruments of capitalism serve as extensions of industrial strategy, and industrial strategy doubles as asset protection.

In doing so, the venture industry and the state locked themselves into a permanent feedback loop. Capital began designing policy to protect its returns; policy began depending on capital to outsource its innovation. The loop stabilized, institutionalized, and eventually hardened into what we now live inside of.

Innovation, once the by-product of risk, is now the output of coordination. Every stimulus package, subsidy, and “strategic technology initiative” eventually flows into the portfolios of the same half-dozen megafunds. Every new “builder manifesto” eventually flows back into legislative talking points.

So what about the risk, I hear you ask? Good question! It certainly hasn’t disappeared; the risk-reward model still holds tight, it has simply been nationalized.

And what was once venture capital has quietly evolved into venture governance, an elaborate mechanism not for discovering the future, but for securing it. By 2020, the venture capital industry had learned the oldest trick in the books: if you can’t predict the future, write the laws that shape it. Or… get out of the market.

Venture Developmentalism as Statecraft

What began as a feedback loop has now hardened into our existing political economy system. The line between the investor and the policymaker (or indeed between the tech company and the state, as I wrote about last week) has effectively disappeared.

Born as a way for Big Venture to stabilize its own returns, venture developmentalism has since evolved into a form of governance. Private capital now performs the functions of the state, while the state performs the functions of private capital! The result is a political economy in which innovation is no longer guided by public mandate but by portfolio strategy.

Hence, the American government no longer simply funds or regulates innovation, but merely outsources it to its own financiers. This includes everything from energy to defense to AI, where federal programs now function less as public initiatives and more as co-investments in the portfolios of Big Venture.

[This, incidentally, is the focus of my current research: how the logic of venture developmentalism (born in Silicon Valley) mirrors the industrial strategies of the Chinese developmental state, where private enterprise and government co-evolve to produce national capacity. In both systems, the boundary between innovation and governance collapses, and the market becomes the medium through which state power is exercised.]

And those same funds, by shaping the narratives, writing the policy drafts, and staffing the advisory boards, govern the direction of that spending in return:

• OpenAI: Valued above $500 billion, its lifeline depends on federal AI co-funding to help finance or fast-track data-center construction, citing AI’s “strategic importance”.

• Tesla: Its market dominance would be impossible without billions in EV tax credits, emissions-trading schemes, and clean-energy subsidies embedded in US and EU climate policy.

• SpaceX: The physical embodiment of the venture–state merger, whereby it operates a quasi-sovereign communications network via Starlink, now essential to Western military operations in Ukraine.

• Anduril: The defense unicorn which secured billion-dollar Pentagon contracts before proving traditional product-market fit.

The result is a hybrid elite fluent in both term sheets and talking points.The people in the government and in venture capital have become one and the same! (A short list, as I’m probably missing a ton):

• David Sacks, for instance, moves seamlessly between (bad) podcast punditry, political fundraising, and venture syndicates, treating the White House as another portfolio company to optimize.

• JD Vance made the migration literal: Y Combinator graduate, Peter Thiel protégé, now Vice President, sitting on committees overseeing the very industrial policies that enrich his own backers.

• Elon Musk: a private investor and founder who supplies national infrastructure (space, satellites, electric grids, AI) while openly directing the heads of state.

• Scott Kupor, a16z’s longtime managing partner, was nominated to head the US Office of Personnel Management (the agency that effectively controls the federal workforce).

• Jacob Helberg, the husband of famed Khosla Ventures managing director Keith Rabois, is serving as Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment.

In this world, the Big Venture investor no longer bets on the market, but clearly manages the economy’s future on behalf of it. And as such, the tools of governance (procurement, subsidies, regulation) are indistinguishable from the tools of venture (seed funding, scaling, exit).

How clever!

So when an administration wants to rebuild American industry, it calls the same people who fund the startups (because these people rebuilding and funding are the same people). Similarly, when venture funds want guaranteed returns, they wrap themselves in the language of national security, competitiveness, or “abundance” to move closer to the White House which grants these outcomes (again: the same people!).

This, incidentally, is what replaces the old neoliberal divide between public and private.

The so-called Venture–State has emerged as a single organism with two heads: one that talks disruption, the other signs the checks. But make no mistake, this is the same entity! Because now, most profitable asset class of the twenty-first century isn’t high-risk technology, it’s certainty, jointly manufactured by both capital and the state, then sold back to the public as “venture capital.” (but you and I both now know that in reality, it’s just Big Venture!).

Because at some point (uh, like, in 2010 onwards), venture stopped behaving like an investment class and started functioning as governance infrastructure, otherwise thought of as a distributed arm of state capacity built out of private capital.

You can trace the shift cleary through three eras:

1. Venture Capitalism (pre-2008)

   • Alpha driven by: Risk and discovery.

   • Example: Early Google, Genentech, small funds, asymmetric bets.

   • Purpose: Generate outsize returns on investment.
     

2. Venture Developmentalism (2008-2020)

   • Alpha driven by: Coordination under the state.

   • Example: Uber, Airbnb, figuring out how to exploit regulatory grey zones while riding zero interest rate liquidity.

   • Purpose: Stabilize returns generation.
     

3. Venture Mercantilism (2020-onwards)

   • Alpha driven by: Integration with policy and industrial strategy.

   • Example: Anduril, Palantir, OpenAI, combining private profit with global government mandates.

   • Purpose: Stabilize hard power generation.

You’ll notice from this list that we’re now living squarely inside this final phase of what I call Venture Mercantilism.

This is essentially where the fusion of capital and state is no longer experimental but institutionalized. It’s where Big Venture no longer cares about scaling markets (where risk lives), and focuses instead on owning the entire governance platform (like democracy). In our current venture mercantilist epoch, Big Venture funds don’t operate like funds at all, rather their modus operandi is in distributing capital in line with national priorities not to generate returns, but to secure entire axes of global power. (More on this soon).

So while Venture Developmentalism was about securing certainty at home such that it stabilized returns by aligning with national policy, Venture Mercantilism, by contrast, projects that logic abroad while widening its goals to include power stabilization.

Big Venture is now using capital, technology, and supply chains as instruments of geopolitical power. You can see it in Peter Thiel’s Anduril, exporting automated defense systems to US allies; in Palantir, whose data platforms underpin NATO intelligence and European security infrastructure; and in SpaceX’s Starlink, which chooses who gets access to communication networks in contested regions. Even venture bets on semiconductors, AI chips, and rare-earth supply chains now function as strategic tools in the US–China rivalry.

Strategic Implications

So what does all of this amount to?

If we accept that Big Venture and the state have fused, then we’re no longer living in an entrepreneurial economy but in a managed one, which is a system where private capital no longer seeks risk but allocates certainty on behalf of the state.

(And this, by the way, is precisely why I am researching the concept of Venture Developmentalism with relation to the growth of the Chinese economy, led by socialism!)

Hence you can see that the very logic of venture has inverted. And that the goal is no longer to discover new markets but to secure existing the markets that hold competitive power through policy, narrative, and procurement.

The impacts of this are many but consider the following:

1. Policy capture has replaced market risk.
Returns now depend less on discovering opportunities and more on embedding within national priorities. This is why you’ll constantly hear the biggest funds telling founders: “We invest at the earliest stages; but also not at your early stage.” The best-performing funds aren’t the ones that predict consumer behavior, but they are the ones that pre-write the regulation and achieving early industrial alignment (defense, AI, energy, semiconductors) has become the new product–market fit.

2. Innovation itself has been securitized.
What once represented risk and discovery has become an asset class with guaranteed liquidity. Defense, climate tech, and chips dominate not because they’re the most creative fields, but because they have state demand curves baked in. Again, this is why I spent two years telling anybody who would listen to me that a much better fund model for a VC fund is actually one that nearly exactly mirrors what we had with mortgage-backed securities! Because every startup now functions like a bond, and every breakthrough is a derivative of industrial policy!

3. The old “military–industrial complex” is now the “Big Venture–industrial complex”.
Other than a change in name, the mechanisms are identical. Procurement is a startup’s exit strategy; fiscal stimulus is the new venture round; and “abundance,” “resilience,” “national competitiveness” is the new branding.

4. Power has been consolidated into a new hybrid elite.
A technocratic aristocracy fluent in both fund liquidity and national legislation, which can actively lobby while discussing launch metrics. These bureaucrat investors manage both sides of the balance sheet: public policy on one during one administration, and private profit on the other during the next administration. It is no longer possible to distinguish the entrepreneur from the policymaker, or the firm from the state. Because they are different departments of the same Big Venture fund.

But What About Little Venture?

Here’s the uncomfortable endnote.

If you’re a venture fund that isn’t doing any of this (no policy alignment, no industrial positioning, no narrative or regulatory leverage), then you are not in the same business as Big Venture. You’re in venture capital, the original game of chasing founders, markets, and luck.

Said another way, you’re in the nostalgia business. While Big Venture manufactures outcomes, you’re literally just buying lottery tickets, and getting paid 2% a year to do that.

This is why the return distribution in VC looks deranged even by power-law standards!

A tiny slice of firms sits on policy-backed certainty and captures most of the gains, massively outperforming the market (because if you are the one writing the revenue checks for your portfolio companies, there’s something wrong if you’re not winning!), while the long tail does “venture capital” in the old sense: sourcing founders, haggling over terms, hoping markets behave accordingly.

Big Venture shapes the game and collects steady wins. Venture capital thinks it’s finding alpha, but really it’s just getting played.

Most funds don’t lose (by which I mean: they do not beat the benchmark, or even the S&P 500) because they’re foolish; they lose because they’re uninstrumented, by which I mean:

• They mistake deal flow for alpha;

• They optimize for access to founders instead of access to rules, budgets, and buyers.

• They staff platform teams but not policy teams;

• They perfect demo days but never build procurement certainty;

• They post Substack think-pieces without turning those arguments into draft language that lands inside an agency legislation.

In an economy where there is political and institutional capture, these types of investment activities can no longer be called investing (although, recreational risk, maybe…).

And this is the real fork in the industry! When I meet a VC, it takes me less than three seconds to figure out which camp they belong to:

On one side: outcome writers (funds that coordinate narrative, network, regulation, and industrial demand into a single machine that converts public priorities into private returns).

On the other: degenerate gamblers (funds that keep playing the 2003 game on a 2025 chessboard). There is very little middle left because the middle requires a market that no longer exists.

Sadly, many VCs aren’t even aware of this shift yet. Because for over a decade, free money raised all boats (by which I mean exit valuations) during an era when SPACs were used to offload really, really shitty portfolios onto the retail investors. So for a very long time, even the smallest and most ill-equipped VCs have thought they were playing the same game as Sequoia or a16z. When in reality, they were still losing money relative the S&P (which does not have 2% management fees).

For the more financially literate readers, consider this: Big Venture has been generating alpha this whole time, meanwhile venture capital is barely existing on artificially cheap beta.

What’s Next for Venture?

Venture capital was once an industry that swapped risk for upside on future outcomes. But what does an industry built on risk do when there’s none left to take?

Here are some general thoughts:

1. Polarization will intensify
The bifurcation between venture capital and Big Venture can only harden. A handful of policy-embedded funds will continue manufacturing outcomes inside the protective walls of government alignment. Everyone else will be pushed to the edges, forced to specialize in niches too small or too weird for Big Venture to care about. Expect a surge in micro-funds, mission-driven capital, and “outsider” ecosystems that operate deliberately outside the policy machine. These will be the last true laboratories of discovery! Small, ideological, and fragile.

2. The frontier will move to the periphery.
As the US and its allies turn innovation into an instrument of power, the next real venture frontiers will appear in the gaps between empires of regions, technologies, and networks too politically awkward or underregulated to be absorbed. This might mean frontier biotech, decentralized infrastructure, or emerging-market ecosystems where venture developmentalism can’t easily reach. These small gaps can only be met with small funds, which is why some mico or solo-GP venture capital funds are actually still generating returns (for now). Ironically, the next Silicon Valley won’t look like Silicon Valley at all.

3. Venture will become infrastructure.
For Big Venture, the path is already clear: deeper integration. The funds that survive will look less like partnerships and more like sovereign entities. By which I mean permanent capital vehicles attached to industrial policy, defense budgets, and national strategy. Big Venture itself won’t end per se; it will ossify into governance and become a permanent feature of how states allocate innovation risk.

The paradox is that this outcome might be venture’s final success. It set out to conquer risk and did. But in doing so, it killed the condition that made it exciting in the first place!

The next phase of venture, if it’s to have one (and I really question this), will depend on who is brave (or reckless?) enough to reintroduce uncertainty into a system that’s spent the last twenty years erasing it.

I suppose somebody’s gotta roll the dice though….